Risk Management

Driving business evolution with enterprise risk management

Better risk management. Period.

Risk management is about more than balancing risk and reward. And it goes beyond regulatory compliance. It's about embedding risk management into everyday processes at all levels of the enterprise to truly drive business evolution.

Regulatory Capital Management

With regulatory requirements in perpetual state of flux, financial institutions are constantly trying to adapt. It’s sort of like Darwinism of the financial world, as failure to comply can threaten a bank’s very survival – and not just because of the regulatory consequences of noncompliance. That’s because the processes and oversight necessary to meet new regulatory obligations – e.g., for Basel II and Basel III, BCBS 239, BCBS 248, Solvency II – can also help you gain a competitive advantage. If you get it right. And we can help. Our solutions provide an end-to-end framework for addressing and reporting on these regulations. Predefined stress-testing methodologies. Preconfigured reporting capabilities. So you can meet regulatory compliance mandates. Avoid penalties. And safeguard profits.

Flexible, powerful risk calculations. A standardized regulatory capital calculation workflow facilitates compliance. Calculations are both configurable and extensible to support requirements today and in the future as regulations change.

Credit Risk

In addition to increasing the compliance requirements banks already face, the new Basel III regulations will impose higher capital costs for credit risk. As banks attempt to offset these costs, collateral will start to play a much bigger role in credit risk management. We can help you manage credit risk in a way that enables you to not only meet regulatory requirements, but also improve your overall performance. How? By merging your collateral management and credit risk management processes through a closer alignment of credit risk and performance management practices.

Reduce your credit risk capital requirements through the judicious use of collateral and more efficient capital allocations, while complying with increasingly complex regulations.

Make smarter lending decisions by assessing credit risk exposure at the time of origination.

More effectively monitor your loan portfolios by calculating and stress testing portfolio exposures, taking into account the effect of netting, collateral and margining, as well as credit derivatives books.

Track and aggregate portfolio performance across multiple dimensions – and in real time.

Easily manage a large number of new calculations, higher data requirements and shorter time horizons.

Optimization. Optimize the credit portfolio using risk/return measures. And optimize collateral to support mitigation, taking into consideration prior claims, as well as currency and maturity mismatch.

Model management. Shorten the model development and deployment lifecycle. And frequently monitor model performance on an ongoing basis.

Risk Decision Making

How easy is it for you to get consolidated risk results across asset classes, portfolios and trading desks? Does the word “daunting” spring to mind? Our risk solutions perform risk calculations faster than any other solution, so you can get results in minutes, not days. That means you can better understand the overall risk position and capital adequacy of the firm. Make more strategic, data-driven risk decisions. Adopt more efficient risk processes. Reduce the probability of losses. And increase profitability.

Real-time risk aggregation. Patent-pending techniques dramatically accelerate processing time for even the most complex risk calculations, so you get significant performance gains.

What-if analysis. Produce what-if scenarios based on the most complex portfolios, positions and instruments across multiple time horizons. Change parameters and rerun scenarios on demand. And examine outcomes relative to potential capital gains/losses, changes in yield or cost of funds.

Intraday recalculation of risk and exposure. Update actual firmwide risk and exposure as often as needed. Respond to changing market conditions, and make timely decisions on portfolio strategies.

Stress Testing

Memories of the financial crisis are still fresh in the minds of many as firms grapple with today’s exploding data volumes, greater problem complexity, mounting performance expectations, shrinking decision windows and ever-changing regulatory requirements. We can help you assess firmwide exposures with speed and precision across all risk types – market, credit and liquidity – intraday or in near-real time. So you can get fast, precise answers to questions about current exposures. Make timely, well-informed decisions – even in highly volatile and stressed markets. And better protect your firm’s capital, liquidity and viability.

Get a consolidated view of your firm’s risk exposures. Centralized stress testing and an integrated platform let you rapidly aggregate portfolio data and internal and external stress-testing factors, as well as create a standardized set of stress scenarios.

React to market shocks faster and with greater precision. Perform intraday, large-scale simulations and ad hoc stress tests based on all available data – not just a sample.

Value large, complex portfolios and asset classes in minutes rather than hours or days. And analyze the effects of changes in cost and liquidity using millions of rows of asset data and thousands of risk and market factors.

An end-to-end framework. Integrate data, scenarios, pricing models, exposure calculations and reporting from across the organization. No one else provides an end-to-end technology framework for managing all aspects of stress testing.

In-memory processing. The latest speed advances in multicore CPUs and our patent-pending software architecture and algorithms greatly speed calculation time for pricing functions, which are directly enabled on the grid. Results are held in-memory and are available for immediate analysis.

A single stress-testing environment. Apply a common set of stress scenarios and factors to aggregations of both the bank book and trading book. Then apply advanced analytics to stress the firmwide portfolio and perform exposure and capital calculations.

Managing liquidity risk is more than a compliance obligation. In fact, it can bring great business and competitive benefits. Find out what critical role finance, IT and risk functions play in managing and mitigating liquidity risk.

What our customers are saying

"SAS is a leader in business analytics and an industry standard. I’ve always found it to be very effective and excellent value for money. I couldn’t think of not working with SAS."

"We now mail out 43% fewer reminders to guaranteed payers. At 20p a letter that's an immediate saving, directly based on SAS."

"Using SAS we can understand debtors, the transactions and interactions we have with them, so we can interact in a far more tailored, effective and efficient way. Decision making is done with science."

SAS is named a Category Leader in the Chartis RiskTech Quadrant™ for Credit Risk Management Systems for the Banking Book 2013.